Pub Day Arrives

I don’t want to belabor the point, so I’ll be brief. My new book, How to Be a High School Superstar, comes out today. You can read more about it here and here and here, or read an excerpt here. You can buy it here or at major bookstores. (If they’re sold out, tell them, so they’ll increase their order!)

My pitch is brief:

• If you appreciate my philosophy and have a family member, friend, or relative in high school, please consider buying them a copy. 
• If you like what you read, please consider adding an Amazon review to encourage others to follow suit. I’m following a strict no-fake-review policy for this book, so I’m leaving it to real readers to give honest opinions.
• If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, perhaps tell your followers and friends it’s something worth looking into. An easy way to spread the word, for example, is to post a link titled “I’m not stressed about college admissions, why are you?” that connects back to the Amazon page for the book.

More importantly:

I can’t thank you enough for your support. This book literally wouldn’t exist without the extended and intelligent conversation I’ve had you, my Study Hacks readers, over the past three years.

Now back to writing…

(Note: The excellent artwork for this post was done by Arturas Petkevicius, an excellent freelance designer who you can contact here. If you want to help spread the word about my book, please feel free to post the image on your Facebook page or blog; send me a link if you do, so I can pass along my thanks.)

Steve and David

Let’s try a simple experiment. Imagine that you’re an admissions officer at a competitive college, and you’re evaluating the following two applicants:

• David — He is captain of the track team and took Japanese calligraphy lessons throughout high school;  he wrote his application essay on the challenge of leading the track team to the division championship meet.
• Steve — He does marketing for a sustainability-focused NGO; he wrote his application essay about lobbying delegates at the UN climate change conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Who impresses you more? 

For most people, there’s little debate: Steve is the star.

But here’s the crucial follow-up question: Why is Steve more impressive than David?

The answer seems obvious, but as you’ll soon discover, the closer you look, the more hazy it becomes. To really understand Steve’s appeal, we will delve into the recesses of human psychology and discover a subtle but devastatingly power effect that will change your understanding of what it takes to stand out.

Steve’s Story

Steve is a real student, one of the many I profile in my new book on students who get into good colleges while still enjoying their high school lives.  He currently attends Columbia University, which he describes as: “a school I would have never gotten into without my UN work.”

Here’s how his story unfolded…

As a high school sophomore, Steve stumbled into an opportunity to attend a UN conference in New York City, near where he lived. A believer in underscheduling, he had been “e-mailing every non-profit under the soon, looking for an unpaid internship.” Most organizations ignored him. One wrote back, however, and said they didn’t have a job for Steve, but they did have a slot for a student to accompany their delegation to an upcoming UN conference on children’s rights.

Steve jumped at the opportunity. He met delegates and learned about related NGOs. He even spoke up in a sub-committee meeting. This led to an invitation to attend an upcoming conference. And then another. In a short span, Steve became a UN insider.

“I loved it,” he recalls.

It was with this experience under his belt that, one year leader, Steve found himself in a conversation with a college student at a model congress conference.

“What sorts of things are you working on?”, she asked.

Steve mentioned the UN.

“The UN?”, she replied, “I work with them.”

As they continued to talk, the young woman revealed that she was involved with a non-profit called SustainUS — a group dedicated to helping American youth advocate for climate issues. SustainUS, at the time, had little money and no office — the employees were volunteers who worked virtually, mainly from college dorm rooms, organizing with Yahoo Groups and free web-based conference calls.

Steve proposed that he help the non-profit gain press coverage for their activism. “I like speaking with people, and I like writing, so that was a natural thing for me to work on,” he recalls. The group agreed.

“At 16, I was younger than the other members,” Steve told me. “But technology masked that.”

Over the next year, Steve called and e-mailed reporters, eventually scoring a few big hits, including a mention in Time Magazine’s Green Issue and a write-up in the Associated Press. As a reward for these efforts, the organization told Steve he could join the team traveling to the UN climate conference in Johannesburg to present a petition signed by American youth.

This was the experience Steve emphasized in his head-turning application essay.

Decoding Steve’s Story

With these details established, let’s return to our motivating question: Why is Steve more impressive than David? The obvious answers now spawn troubling complications:

• Explanation: Steve worked hard.
  Issue: Being a varsity athlete requires many more hours of hard work than Steve’s efforts.
• Explanation: Steve revealed brilliance or natural talent.
  Issue: It’s hard to identify any specific brilliance or talent in Steve’s story. His path required him to attend conferences and send pitches to reporters. Being captain of a varsity sports team, by contrast, requires great natural ability — both in terms of athleticism and leadership.
• Explanation: Steve showed “passionate” commitment.
  Issue: So did David. He stuck with track through four grueling years and kept up his calligraphy throughout this same period.
• Explanation: Steve did something unusual, creative, and outside the structure of the school.
  Issue: Japanese calligraphy is also unusual, creative, and outside the structure of the school.

Steve’s impressiveness is intuitive and inescapable, but as the above exercise reveals, rationalizing this reaction proves tricky. To sidestep this obstacle, we must appeal to the curious psychology of social comparison.

Lassiter’s Insight

What happened inside your brain when you read the descriptions of David and Steve? According to a clever series of experiments conducted by G. Daniel Lassiter, a psychology professor at the University of Ohio, your first response was to look into the proverbial mirror. Or, as Lassiter describes it, somewhat more formally,  in his 2002 paper on the subject: we have a “pervasive tendency…to use the self as a standard of comparison in [our] dispassionate judgments of others.”

Put another way, to evaluate a person’s accomplishments, we imagine ourselves attempting the same feat, allowing your own capabilities to provide a convenient benchmark for assessing others’.

(In Lassiter’s experiments, students took tests made up of difficult mathematical puzzles. He showed that when a student was asked to rate the intelligence of another student, this judging student used a self-assessment of his own intelligence, combined with how well he did on the test, to construct the rating.)

Let’s walk through the logic here. When you first encountered David and Steve, your brain began to compare them to yourself. In essence, your brain asked: “Could I do that? And if so, what would it require?”

For David, this question was easy to answer. Assuming you had more or less the same athletic ability, you could imagine yourself becoming captain of the track team: show up on time to practice, work hard, respect the coaches, etc. The Japanese calligraphy is even easier to imagine yourself learning — it requires only that you sign up for lessons. You might conclude that David has more natural athletic ability and is a harder worker than yourself, but neither of these assessments leads you to think of him as a star.

(Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting.)

Then there’s Steve. Your attempts to mentally simulate Steve’s path likely derailed. How the hell does a 16-year old end up lobbying delegates at an international UN conference? Your failed simulation then lead to a powerful conclusion: he must possess something special. This conclusion is soon followed by a feeling of profound impressiveness.

I call this outcome the failed simulation effect, which I formally define as follows:

The Failed Simulation Effect
Accomplishments that are hard to explain can be much more impressive than accomplishments that are simply hard to do.

This is the secret of Steve. He’s not brilliant. super passionate, or ultra-hard working — instead, he accomplished something that’s hard to explain. This is why he is more impressive than David, even though his high school career required less time devoted to extracurricular activities.

“Stanford Doesn’t Take Students with B’s!”

To help cement this concept, let’s consider the story that inspired the title of this post…

In the late spring of 2004, Kara, a junior at an elite Bay Area private high school, felt nervous as she arrived for a meeting with her college counselor.  Over the past three years, Kara had avoided the crush of competitive activities and AP courses that her peers suffered through to impress their reach schools. Even more galling to the hyper-competitive students at her school, she had even allowed the occasional B to creep onto her transcript.

(When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like linear algebra.”)

“You’re on the cross country team, which is good,” the counselor began, when Kara sat down in her office. “But you’re not the president of any clubs, and with these grades, you’re just not going to get into your reach schools.”

Kara stammered a response, but was cut off: “Kara, Stanford doesn’t take students with B’s!”

This counselor, however, had not taken the failed simulation effect into account. It’s true that Kara had avoided an overloaded schedule, and in general enjoyed her high school experience. (“I was perceived as the relaxed kid at my high school,” Kara told me recently, grinning sheepishly as if admitting a crime. ) But her main activity, when described right, thwarts any attempt to be mentally simulated: she had developed a technology-based health curriculum that was adopted in ten states.

When you dig deeper, Kara’s path to this accomplishment was much like Steve’s — serendipitous occurrences developed, over time, into something inexplicable.  But these details are irrelevant, because before you can ponder the reality of the story, the failed simulation effect has taken hold.

Indeed, in defiance of her counselor’s protestations, Kara did get accepted to Stanford — not to mention Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and MIT, where she now attends.

The Most Important Effect You’ve Never Heard Of

I devote an entire third of my new book to exploring the failed simulation effect. I also made it a cornerstone of Study Hack’s zen valedictorian philosophy. So it’s clear that I’m a huge believer in its power. This being said, it’s still fair to ask whether this neat abstract concept actually plays a role in real world admissions decisions.

To answer this question, I turned to Dr. Michele Hernandez.  Dr. Hernandez is a former assistant dean of admissions at Dartmouth College and the author of the bestselling book, A is for Admission. She currently runs an elite college counseling service, and offers a popular 4-day application boot camp.

In other words, when it comes to figuring out what works in college admissions, Dr. Hernandez is the person to ask.

“College admissions officers are only human,” she told me. “If they stop to say to themselves as they read a file, ‘wow, I wonder how Nancy managed to do this,’ that will be a huge plus.”

Though the specific name, failed simulation effect, is new to Dr. Hernandez, the general concept is not: “In my private practice, I always push students to try something like this that will make them stand out. My most successful students are those that take me up on my offer.”

Such students, however, are surprisingly rare, and this is due to a thorny reality: it can be incredibly difficult to put this effect into practice.

A Simulated Catch-22

Like many students, your instinct on first hearing about the failed simulation effect was probably to think to yourself: “What could I do, like Steve or Kara, that will generate this same reaction?”

Unfortunately, the chances are slim that you’ll come up with a good answer.

Here’s why: If you’re able to think up an activity that will generate this effect, then, by definition, you were able to simulate the steps required to complete the activity — otherwise, it wouldn’t have come up as a possibility. If you’re able to simulate these steps, then it’s likely that other people could simulate them as well. The result: the activity will not generate the effect.

It’s a catch-22: if you can think up the activity, it won’t have the traits you need.

Fortunately, Steve’s story highlights an escape from this paradox.

The Insider Advantage

Sophomore-year Steve could not have woken up one morning and thought: “I got it! I’ll find a youth-focused sustainability organization and volunteer to work on their media outreach so I can earn a trip to a UN conference!”

But for junior-year Steve, who had already done work with the UN, leading him to meet a representative of SustainUS, this failed simulation effect-generating idea was completely natural.

The difference is that junior-year Steve had become an insider. We can generalize this observation into an effective strategy for finding similar projects:

1. Choose a field.
   If you have a deep interest, this makes the choice obvious, but don’t over think this decision: you don’t need some mythical perfect match with some equally mythical innate talents or passions — your interest will grow with your involvement.
2. Get your foot in the door.
   Join a community; volunteer; attend a conference: whatever exposes you to the inside workings of the field
3. Pay your dues.
   The more you exceed expectations, the quicker you’ll rise to insider status.
4. Once you’re an insider — and not before –  seek projects with failed simulation effect potential.
   If you start this search before your an insider, you’ll end up with generic ideas that are easily simulatable.

In other words, devote your energies towards becoming an insider and head-turning project possibilities will eventually come along for free.

Putting the Pieces Together

As you age, the failed simulation effect becomes less relevant. At its core is the surprising juxtaposition of an impressive accomplishment and the young age of its progenitor. When you’re 25, by contrast, and trying to craft a remarkable life, the failed simulation effect won’t save you from actually becoming really good at something rare and valuable.

But for a high school student, this effect can provide a strong foundation for building an impressive college application without living an overloaded lifestyle.

As mentioned, I devote an entire third of my new book to detailed case studies and step-by-step instructions for how to realistically integrate this advice into your life. If you’re serious about this philosophy, you might consider pre-ordering a copy. In the meantime, however, the ideas laid out in this article should be more than enough to get you started: quit the key club; ditch the expensive mission trip; drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule; and put your attention toward becoming an insider.

Then once you’re on the inside, let the failed simulation effect lead you to an uncluttered, meaningful, and happy high school life.

(Photo by Luke Redmond)

The Admissions Outliers

Olivia shouldn’t have been accepted to the University of Virginia. At least, not according to the conventional wisdom on college admissions.

Olivia attended a small private school near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had good grades and test scores, but nothing phenomenal. More striking, she maintained a minimal extracurricular schedule. During the school year, she was a member of the dance team, which satisfied her school’s athletic requirement. She also joined the tech crew for the school musical and was the co-chair of her senior class’s community service organization.

Combined, her school year activities required only seven to eight hours of effort per week.

During the summer, she worked in a marine zoology laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, studying lobsters and horseshoe crabs with a research group run by her neighbor, a professor at the university. She started as a part-time, unpaid volunteer, but the position  morphed into a full time summer job when the professor discovered extra money in his grant.

“It was not a big commitment at all,” Olivia told me, reflecting on her high school obligations.

Students familiar with competitive college admissions tend to have the same reaction to Olivia: she’s a solid applicant, but certainly not good enough to earn a spot at a top-twenty school like UVA. Research involvement has become a standard item on modern applications — the 21st century equivalent of becoming student council president –  and her school-year activities are nearly non-existent by the standards of most competitive applications.

Olivia, however, defied this reaction.  Not only was she accepted at UVA, she also won the hyper-competitive Jefferson Scholarship – a merit-based award, given out by UVA alumni, that covers the full cost of attending the school.

Most high school senior classes have a student like Olivia – someone who defies our understanding of who should get accepted to competitive colleges. We tend to attribute these outliers to the “randomness” of the admissions process. Indeed, even Olivia was surprised by her own success: “I wasn’t stressed like the other students at my school, because I wasn’t interested in trying to impress colleges,” she told me. “I still don’t understand how I got into UVA.”

In this article, by contrast, I argue that the success of students like Olivia is not the result of randomness. It instead points to a surprising possibility: perhaps our understanding of extracurricular activities and their role in the college process is all wrong.

Beyond the List Quality Hypothesis

We’re surprised by admissions outliers like Olivia because their accomplishments fall short of the quality we expect from top applicants. This surprise, of course, requires the belief that the role of extracurricular activities is to signal important qualities about the applicant. It’s common, for example, to hear students talk about an activity demonstrating their “leadership potential” or “passionate commitment.”

I call this understanding the list quality hypothesis, and if you subscribe to this belief, Olivia remains a mystery; her activities don’t signal enough outstanding things to make her competitive at a top school.

Having spent the last three years researching outliers, like Olivia, for my new book, I’ve noticed a surprising trend: the greatest asset of these relaxed superstars is not the quality of their activities, but the fact that they’re genuinely interesting people. This trait, which I call interestingness, permeates their application – from their essay to recommendations – and has a profoundly positive impact on their admissions chances.

For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than for their peers.  They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness, but its impact on your personality.

I call this idea the interestingness hypothesis, and it upends conventional wisdom on how to get accepted at a competitive college.

How Olivia Got Into UVA

In March 2008, when Olivia sat down for her final interview with the Jefferson Scholarship Committee, she was plagued by nerves.

“At the time, I felt really insecure,” she recalls. “Maybe I should have played varsity soccer and lacrosse, and you know, become student council president.”

Then one of the committee members turned to her. “So, tell me about these horseshoe crabs,” he asked.

Olivia began to talk about her research from the past summer, where she helped the graduate students in her lab try to match the movement of horseshoe crabs in New Hampshire’s Great Bay to the movement of the tides. They were pursuing the hypothesis that crabs use the tides to coordinate their migrations.

It soon became clear that over the past three years, Olivia had developed a deep interest in this work. It had started, perhaps, during the  daily commute to campus, which she made with her neighbor – the professor who ran the research lab. His enthusiasm for marine zoology infused their conversations.

“One morning — to give you an example — the professor began going on about a paper on some neurotransmitter in the brain of lobsters,” Olivia told me. “It wasn’t his area of research, but he was fascinated anyway.”

This enthusiasm, evidently, proved contagious, as Olivia began to pursue the subject on her own time.

The conversation with the scholarship committee shifted. Olivia began talking about the book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, which describes how simple small-scale decisions can aggregate into complex large-scale behavior (for example, dumb ants creating smart colonies).

Olivia had read the book for fun, and started riffing with the committee about how Johnson’s ideas might apply to marine zoology. “Was it possible,” she wondered out loud, “that the complex migrations of horseshoe crabs might also be an emergent trait?”

Most students, when faced with a similar interview situation, fall back on emphasizing their activities and the traits they signal. “Running my church youth group,” they might say, “is another example of my leadership ability.”

Olivia followed a different path. She didn’t emphasize her activities (which, in isolation, weren’t all that impressive) or the qualities they supposedly signaled, instead she let her natural interestingness come through – and her interviewers were entranced.

Put another way: she rejected the list quality hypothesis, embraced the interestingness hypothesis, and won a full-ride scholarship for her efforts.

Students Aren’t Born Interesting, They Earn It

The interestingness hypothesis is appealing — using a small number of activities to transform yourself into an interesting person is much less demanding than trying to build a long list of time-consuming commitments. But when I tell the story of relaxed superstars like Olivia, most high schools students balk.

“That’s great for her,” they say. “But there’s nothing in my life that I’m that interested about!”

They then go join the Key Club.

This reaction is based on the common belief that only a few lucky students are born naturally interesting, while everyone else has to prove their worth the hard way – one demanding extracurricular commitment at a time.

But is this true?

In 2001, a research team led by Professor Linda Caldwell of Penn State University, conducted an experiment that effectively put the idea of the naturally interesting student to the test.  They gathered a group of middle school students from four rural Pennsylvania school districts. A subset of these students were randomly selected to receive a six-week training course called TimeWise. The goal of the course was to teach the students to make better use of their free time (their theory was that less bored students are less likely to fall into dangerous behaviors, such as drug use).

One of the lessons, for example, taught students how to balance what they “have to do” with what they “want to do,” while another provided strategies for following up on an idea that seemed interesting.

After the course finished, all of the students were subjected to a battery of tests to assess their interestingness. As Caldwell described the results in a 2004 paper, the group that received the training showed “higher levels of interest (and thus lower levels of boredom) than the [control] group,” they also “scored higher…on initiative…the ability to restructure boring situations…and the ability to plan and make decisions [about their] free time.” They participated in more new and interesting activities than the students in the control group and were overall more happy.

This is an astonishing result.

We tend to think about interestingness as an innate trait possessed by a lucky few, but Caldwell and her team revealed that a half-dozen common-sense lessons were enough to make a significant difference in the measured interestingness of randomly-selected middle school students.

If these basic lessons had such an impact on bored middle schoolers, imagine the change possible for someone committed to the goal of becoming more interesting.

How to Become Interesting

Intrigued by Caldwell’s results, I called her to ask if she could distill some lessons from her research. I wanted her advice for a student hoping to become more interesting.

“You need to be exposed to many things – you should expose yourself even though you might not know if you’ll be interested,” she told me.

“You need some time when you turn off the phone and the instant messenger and take a walk to appreciate the world without something in your ear.”

(This should sound familiar to fans of Ben Casnocha, one of the most interesting people I know.)

In other words, to become more interesting…

1. Do fewer structured activities.
2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.
3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up.

Olivia’s story follows this structure. As a sophomore, she was a believer in rules 1 and 2; she kept her obligations light and maintained an addiction to interesting things. After getting a good grade on a chemistry project on nitrogen in marine habitats, she e-mailed her neighbor on a whim (demonstrating rule 3 in action). “I knew he did something with lobsters,” she recalls, “and thought ‘maybe he would want an unpaid volunteer over the summer.’”

He did. And two years later she won the Jefferson Scholarship.

Pulling The Pieces Together

My argument is simple:

• High school students place too much emphasis on the qualities demonstrated by their activities. In a quest to demonstrate as many good qualities as possible, they end up stressing themselves with unwieldy lists of time-consuming commitments.
• Students like Olivia highlight a different approach. They show that that being interesting can go farther than being widely accomplished. With this in mind, they use activities to build their interestingness – not their credentials – and therefore enjoy happier lives.
• The research of Linda Caldwell supports a powerful corollary: any student can become more interesting – it’s not an innate trait possessed only by a lucky few. The key, roughly speaking, is to allow yourself more time to stare at the clouds, and then be prepared to follow-up when you spot something cool.

These ideas are so important that I dedicate the first half of my new book arguing their validity. I’ll also be returning to this territory over the next few months, as I continue this series on what really makes impressive students impressive. In the meantime, however, you can ease your mind into this counterintuitive conversation with a simple thought: Just because most students follow the same stressful strategy for becoming a standout, doesn’t mean that it’s the only strategy for reaching this goal.

Just ask Olivia, who quipped, when reflecting on her path into UVA: “I feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world.”

(Photo by Greenmonster.)

The Relaxed Superstars

I receive a lot of e-mails asking about my new book. I realize that I’ve only given a few vague details on the project to date, so I thought I would rectify that today by bringing you up to speed.

Synopsis

The book focuses on a group of high school students I call relaxed superstars. These are students who live low-stress, under-scheduled, relaxed high school lives yet still do phenomenally well in college admissions. In the book I tell their stories and deconstruct how they pull this off.

To date I’ve interviewed around 20 such students. I can guarantee that their stories will change the way you think about college admissions. You’ll encounter students who enjoyed abundant free time (due to reasonable course loads and minimal junk extracurriculars), yet still breezed into schools like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. Their secret almost always involves focused attention on an innovative project they loved.

Consider, for example, Michael. As a high school student in Arizona he focused his attention on a series of projects involving sustainability. He didn’t do them all at once, but, instead, one after the other, each building on the last. During his junior year, he took only 1 AP course. He participated in no other extracurricular activities. His schedule was so flexible that he adopted the habit of going on a 1 – 2 hour hike, immediately following school, four days out of five every week.

Michael loved his life.

He’s currently a student at Stanford.

Most people have a sense that students like Michael exist. Almost every senior class has that one happy, laid back guy who surprises everyone when he gets accepted to Harvard. My book is simply the first to track them down, interview them, and figure out how the hell they made this happen.

I want to offer talented high school students a path to academic success that doesn’t involve living a terrible, stress-saturated life.

Format

The book is divided into three parts, one for each of the three major “laws” followed by these students: underschedule, focus, and innovate. Fans of Study Hacks will recognize these as the three laws of the zen valedictorian. (In fact, in my original proposal I called these students zen valedictorians, but my publishers, rightly so, thought the word “zen” was overused.)

Each of the three parts is divided into two halves. The first half explains the law and why it’s true. It also provides examples of real relaxed superstars putting the law into action. The second half provides concrete advice for the reader to integrate the insights into his or her own student life.

Progress

I’m on track to finish a rough draft of the entire manuscript by the end of next week. (Whew!) That leaves me a summer to edit before I submit the first draft to my publisher in September. I think this adds up to a spring of 2010 publication date, but I’m not definite about that.

My System

People often ask how I juggle book writing with other obligations. For example, while writing this manuscript I’m also writing my PhD dissertation and keeping up a fast-paced research publishing schedule.

My method is the same I used for my previous two books (and is shared by many other professional writers). I write first thing in the morning most weekdays and occasionally on the weekend. Usually for 1 – 2 hours. Rarely more. Because it’s first thing in the morning, nothing else can hijack my time. And because I insist on long publishing contracts, these small pushes are enough to build to a quality final result.

More Soon…

As I shift into the editing phase, I’ll share more updates about the project. It’s been really hard to keep silent about all of the exceptional content I’ve been working through in my monkish isolation. Expect me to start leaking more details soon.

In the meantime, if you have a good idea for a title, let me know! I’m stumped…

In response to my recent article on Misery Poker, a reader commented:

I wonder about the really exceptional people. Does Barack Obama “build a realistic schedule”? … maybe extraordinary stress IS required to accomplish extraordinary feats

Another reader added:

I think extraordinary sacrifices are required for great accomplishments.

This is a fascinating argument. Study Hacks, as you know, is driven by the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, which claims that it’s possible to be both relaxed and impressive. But these commenters are pushing back on this world view. It’s one to thing, they note, to have a successful college career that is also relaxed, but is it possible to have an exceptional career without overwhelming amounts of work?

In this post I claim it is possible. And I’ll explain exactly how…

Barriers and Myths

Let’s start with the myth that drives most peoples’ thinking about what it takes to be exceptional:

The Exceptional Effort Myth: Exceptional results require exceptional amounts of effort.

The logic here is obvious. By definition, if something is exceptional it’s also rare. If it’s rare, there must some difficult barrier to achievement.

This we can agree on.

But what is this barrier? Most people default to the simplest explanation: the barrier that makes exceptional achievement rare is that it requires an exceptional amount of work. This gives us the myth highlighted above.

For some endeavors, of course, this myth matches reality. For example:

1. Running for president.
2. Aggressively growing a start-up business.
3. Becoming a standout junior associate at your law firm.

These exceptional achievements absolutely require lots and lots of work. Their criteria for success have amount of effort explicitly built in. A young lawyer, for example, is judged almost exclusively on the number of hours he bills.

But here’s the thing (and this is the important part): I claim that for most exceptional endeavors, an exceptional amount of work is not required. In other words, the barrier to exceptional achievement is not the volume of effort, but something else entirely…

The Magic of Deliberative Practice

Last year, Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune Magazine, wrote an article titled: Why Talent is Overrated. It was a sensation. He received so many letters that he soon expanded the ideas into a full length book of the same name, which was released last month.

At the core of the article was a simple proposition: the real path to great performance is not built on natural talent or volume of hard work. As Colvin describes, recent research has increasingly highlighted, instead, the importance of a very specific type of work called deliberative practice.

Researchers claim that it’s this type of practice — not natural talent, and not raw hours spent working — that makes the bulk of the difference between exceptional people and the rest.

Colvin provides five traits that define deliberative practice:

1. It is designed specifically to improve performance.
   “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.”
2. It can be repeated a lot.
   “Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent.”
3. Feedback on results is continuously available.
   “[Y]ou may believe you played that bar of the Brahms violin concerto perfectly, but can you really trust your own judgment? In many important situations, a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.”
4. It is highly demanding mentally.
   “Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities…no one can sustain it for very long.”
5. It’s hard.
   “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”

I want to draw your attention to point (4). In further explaining this property, Colvin tells a story:

Nathan Milstein, one of the 20th century’s greatest violinists, was a student of the famous teacher Leopold Auer. As the story goes, Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers, and you need all day. Practice with your mind, and you will do as much in 1-1/2 hours.” What Auer didn’t add is that it’s a good thing 1-1/2 hours are enough, because if you’re truly practicing with your mind, you couldn’t possibly keep it up all day.

In other words, deliberative practice is hard. It demands we leave our comfort zone. We need expert feedback. We have to return again and again to the same trouble areas to get better. But the one thing it’s not is exceptionally time consuming. It can’t be. You simply can’t keep it up for 12 hours a day.

Pulling It All Together

I’m fascinated by deliberative practice because it provides a missing piece to our ongoing conversation about becoming a standout.

Recall, for example, our discussion of Steve Martin. His path to becoming famous was defined by deliberative practice: every night, he would return to a comedy club and try to push his comedy a little bit further into new territory. This was hard. But instead of defaulting to easy laughs he relentless drove his routine forward.

We see similar patterns with our student case studies:

While Toph was working in Australia, he kept taking on projects that stretched him beyond his current ability within the marketing field. The result was a rapid rise. When he left, the company begged him to stay.

Scott had a similar experience pushing himself to become an Eastern Europe expert once he arrived at Law School. He’s now on his way to a Fullbright Scholarship.

Here’s my conclusion. For most endeavors, the path to becoming exceptional requires that:

1. You focus on one thing and commit to it over a long period of time.
2. During this period, you consistently engage in deliberative practice, again and again, to cause a rapid rise in your ability.

This approach is consistent with the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. The practice is hard but short. If you’re properly focused and can put in an hour or two of deliberative work on most days, you can become exceptional. Doing more work isn’t going to help. Neither will tacking on dozens of other activities or commitments.

So if your goal is to become a true star, take a careful look at how you spend your time. Beneath all of your activities and faux-busyness, what really matters is the time spent buckling down and putting in the right type of effort to get better at what’s most important to you. Everything else is just for show.

(Photo by Thirty30; modified by author)

I’m intrigued by a second century Greek philosopher named Epictetus. He was a stoic. This means, roughly, that he believed the key to a good life is focusing on what you can control, not lamenting about what you cannot.

In other words: A stoic doesn’t sweat bad stuff happening. His concern is how he behaves when the going gets tough.

Because I’m weird, I recently skimmed two different translations of Epictetus’s The Enchiridion: a handbook describing 52 life lessons. There was one lesson in particular — lesson 29 — that caught my attention. It provides a piercing analysis of an issue that we discuss often on this blog: should you focus on a small number of things or experiment with many?

Here is what Epictetus had to say:

In every affair consider what precedes and follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit; but not having thought of the consequences, when some of them appear you will shamefully desist.

In other words, think carefully before adding a new commitment. Otherwise, your initial energy is likely to flag. Something he calls “shameful.”

He continues:

Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, at another a gladiator, now a philosopher, then an orator; but with your whole soul, nothing at all.

In case his point is unclear, he gets a little cruder:

Like an ape, you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar.

It’s amazing how familar this sounds to the modern ear. How often have we grappled with interests that become boring once the initial zeal wears off.

He concludes:

[D]on’t, like children, be one while a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad.

Here lies his zinger: “You must be one man.”

To a stoic, like Epictetus, focusing your attention on one thing that aligns with your talents is not about maximizing your impact, it’s a moral imperative. Being ambiguous, be it in your virtues or your pursuits, is a recipe for disaster.

A stoic demands stability. A stoic believes this stability — a laser-like confidence in what’s important — will guide him safely through life’s unexpected kicks to the metaphorical groin. Personal pursuits aren’t exempt from this equation.

This is strong stuff. I love how much the issues of two millenia past resonate with our own discussions. Replace “philosopher,” “publican,” “orator,” and “Ceaser’s officers” with “national honors society member,” “leader of cultural affinity club,” “student researcher,” and “member of student government,” and Epictetus’s quotes would be at home in one of my focus screeds.

I’m still trying to find out, however, how I feel about Epictetus’s particular stoic take on this issue.

Here are the two questions that pop to mind:

1. Is it really our soul’s optimal state to be aligned in one pursuit that we’ve really considered?
2. Or is Epictetus’s old fashioned thinking missing the benefits that come from keeping many brands in the fire, and hopping from interest to interest in search of the fresh and inspiring?

What do you think?

Related Articles

• Getting Started is Overrated
• The Difference Between Experiments and Goals
• The Steve Martin Method
• Action is Overrated
• The Einstein Principle

Judging by reader feedback, “innovation” is the most beguiling of the Zen Valedictorian principles. If you’ll recall, it states:

Activities that are hard to explain are more impressive than activities that are hard to do.

This principle holds great appeal because hard to explain activities don’t have to be unduly demanding of your time or talent. In other words, knocking the socks off an admissions officer might not require getting to Carnegie Hall or winning a national competition.

Many students, however, have trouble applying this principle to their own life. They often ask: “how do I find an innovative activity?”

In this post, I want to offer a specific activity innovation strategy targeted for high school students. It’s just one strategy of the many possible, but I hope its concreteness will help get your own thought process rolling. I should note: it’s not my idea. It was explained to me by a student who used it to get into Princeton. After I explain the details, I’ll tell you her story…

The Independent Study Method for Activity Innovation

This strategy for developing an innovative activity in high school works as follows:

1. Get a student internship or volunteer position at an organization that does something that interests you.
2. Pay your dues. Finish the scut work fast and well. Ask questions. Show a real interest.
3. After establishing yourself as a fixture at the organization, try to identify a small open research question that interests them. Propose that you work on that question, under their supervision. For example, if you’re volunteering at an environmental policy organization, you might look into how effective a new strategy has been in your state; nothing that requires great experience, just time and organization. (For the environmental policy example, this might mean developing a survey then calling up places that have tried the new strategy and ask them about it.)
4. Setup the project as an independent study at your high school, allowing you to do the work for course credit. Most high schools have IS programs. Typically, they allow you a reduced schedule so you have time to get things done on your project.
5. At the end of the semester, present your findings to the organization. Bonus points if you make some little recommendations that they actually follow.

Here’s what’s cool about this approach:

• It’s wildly impressive. When an admissions officer sees that you went off and did a piece of original research that changed the way an organization does business…well, let’s just say you’ll do better than the guy with 12 club memberships.
• It’s not time consuming. In fact, it will probably make your life easier. You can take a reduced course load and only attend school for a half day. The research itself is entirely self-directed and there is no competition against other students for grades.
• It’s fun. Assuming you choose an organization that interests you, it will be cool learning more about the field.

The Technique in Practice

I first heard about this technique from a student who I will call Sarah. Her interest was urban education (she went to a school in an urban area.) She got started with our technique by landing a student assistant position at a nearby charter school. She paid her dues. Eventually they let her tutor some younger students. She did really well. Finally, she proposed that they let her lead a student reading group that met once a week. She knew the charter school was interested in different methods for teaching advanced reading, so she proposed a research project to go along with it.

The school where she worked agreed and the school where she attended let her set this up as an independent study project. The result: she only attended school until 11:30 am each day, took only four classes — two A.P.s, two electives — and breezed into Princeton.

Sarah’s not alone. Another student I met, who I will call Eric, was a high school student in California who was an active member of a youth fire and rescue program. When the program hit hard times, he saw his opening, and volunteered to take over a leadership position and help nurse it back to health. His school let him tackle this as an independent study. Like Sarah, Eric was able to avoid the A.P.-saturated course load of his friends, and spend only a half-day in the classroom. He was easily accepted to Northwestern, his reach school.

One Plan of Many

This independent study route is not the answer for everyone. I hope, however, that by seeing a specific plan in action you’ll expand your understanding of real world innovation. Remember, there are a million ways to replace hard with interesting. Hopefully this helps you find the one that fits you.

(Photo by Eric James Sarmiento)

I recently came across this note from a high school student. It was posted anonymously on a public college discussion forum:

I do a lot: I’m a costumer for the school play, I play three instruments, I take a dual enrollment class, I am taking 5 AP classes, I am being privately tutored in a foreign language, I am the president and founder of a club as well as a member of the debate team, I’m organizing both a multi-cultural fair and a book fair at my school, I’m secretary for the French club, I’m a member of the Honor Board and I founded a non-profit organization. But quite frankly, I don’t have room to breath and I’m feeling the effects of it physically.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know this student. But his story provides a purified, almost exaggerated example of the activity stress that plagues so many students. Because of this, I think he makes a great case study for our Zen Valedictorian philosophy. My goal for this article is to answer the following question: how could this student make his life much less horrible without hurting his college admissions chances? Is such a thing even possible? We’ll find out…

The Activity Lists

Let’s start by dividing this student’s activities into two lists:

List A

• Costumer for a school play
• Plays three instruments
• Has a private language tutor
• Has a heavy course load
• Member of the debate team
• Organizing book fair
• Organizing multi-cultural fair
• Secretary of the French club
• Member of the honor board

List B

• Founded and runs his own club
• Founded and runs his own non-profit

We begin with List A. The sheer size of this list likely causes massive stress in this poor student’s life. But does it add anything interesting to his story? To answer this question, let’s remember the Failed Simulation Effect…

Failed Simulation Effect: People are impressed by things that are hard to explain, not hard to do.

Apply this logic to List A. Is anything on that list hard to explain? Let me put this another way: is there anything on that list that you couldn’t do if you wanted to? The answer is “no.” Every item, in isolation, is something that anyone could sign up and do so long as he had the hours — or in the case of the language tutor, the money — to devote to it.

Accordingly, the impressiveness of List A is reduced to one thing: this student is able to juggle a large volume of relativity easy activities. But here’s the important point: juggling a large volume of relatively easy activities — though time-consuming — does not impress admissions officers. They want to build interesting classes; not diligent ones.

Let me go a step farther. This student could replace the entire List A with the following:

Equivalent to List A

• Spends 20 hours a week transcribing the phone book

Okay, so I’m being a little facetious here. But I’m trying to make a point. Both would have roughly the same impact on an admissions officer: the kid can force himself to work for a large number of hours. (Actually, this revised List A might be better. As we learned in our study of the Laundry-List Fallacy, having a long list of easy activities can signal less value than doing no easy activities at all.)

The Magic of List B

Fear not. All is not lost for our stoic student. Turn your attention to the comparably svelte List B. This list, by contrast, strongly invokes the Failed Simulation Effect — how the hell does a high school student start his own non-profit or club? The effect is instant: he must be doing something amazing! (Remember: people respect hard work but idolize magic.)

The activities in List B are exactly the type of things that make admissions officers — and people in general — swoon.

What Would a Zen Valedictorian Do?

If I knew this student and he came to me for advice, I would tell him to take a page out of the Zen Valedictorian playbook, which recommends, at a high-level:

1. Ditch all but your most inexplicable activities.
2. Focus on what remains and wring out the most possible impressiveness.
3. Resist the urge to fill in your newfound free time.

For this student, this translates to the following specific actions:

1. Drop everything in List A.
2. Turn your attention to pushing the two activities in List B toward new, cooler places. The more it makes someone say “How did he do that?”, the better.
3. Don’t stress out about the fact that you now have abundant free time. Use it to explore or to relax or to try to impress girls at ill-conceived high school parties.

Think about this. With just a fraction of the time he’s wasting playing three instruments and being the secretary of the French club (really!? the French club?) he could be meeting interesting people and forming partnerships for his non-profit. Somewhere in there he’d probably be invited to speak at a conference, or a reporter would do an article on him. You know how this works. This type of random stumbling is what generates truly impressive students. Above all else: this slimmed lifestyle would be more impressive and exponentially less stressful than his current one.

Zen Resistance

Would this student accept this advice? Probably not. Giving up the security of doing what everyone else is doing can be difficult. And the cult of voluminous activities exerts a powerful hold. But I hope the case study provides you, faithful reader of Study Hacks, a little jolt; perhaps dislodging you from an activity rut that’s generating too much stress. Once you start questioning the assumptions behind your actions, you’ll often be surprised by the better options you discover that have been waiting there all along.

(Photo by rick)

At the core of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy is the idea that if you really understand the psychology of impressiveness, you can, in effect, hack your image — making yourself outrageously impressive without having to become outrageously hard working.

I introduced two techniques for achieving this goal. The first, focus, stated that becoming very good at one thing was more impressive (and less time consuming) than becoming kind of good at many. The second technique, innovate, was more difficult to parse. It stated that any activity that made someone think “how did he do that!?” would yield rewards that were disproportionately large compared to the effort put in.

In this post, I dive into the details of this idea and describe both why the innovate factor is so strong and how you can achieve it.

Some Innovative Examples

Let’s begin with some examples. Below are three activities that generate the “how did he do that!?” response. Each is based, loosely, off of real students:

1. A high school student who designed a technology-based curriculum recently adopted by several states.
2. A college student who setup the U.N.’s first youth advisory council and led the effort to write a youth rights constitution adopted by the Arab League.
3. A high school student who ran a web design company that involved the managing of a dozen contract employees and servicing 5-figure corporate contracts.

Each of these examples, most will agree, are impressive. These students, no doubt, will have many interesting opportunities afforded to them: they’ll get accepted to good colleges (relative to their grades) and have their pick of cool jobs. Lurking behind this reality, however, is an insistent question: why, exactly, do these activities command so much respect?

Some Non-Innovative Examples

To help answer this question, consider, as a point of comparison, the following list of more standard activities:

1. A high school student who was the president of two student clubs and was a member of the varsity tennis team.
2. A college student who did well in a double-major and also sat on two different student activity councils.
3. A high school student who played trumpet in her state’s regional orchestra.

Compared to the previous list, these three activities probably did not elicit the same level of admiration. Certainly, these students are more impressive than the average schlub, but, on the other hand, we don’t imagine them necessarily breezing into top colleges or having their pick of post graduation jobs. Whereas the students in the first list might be called superstars, these latter students might be stuck with the moniker of “grind,” “hardworking,” or, pronounced, no doubt, with a note of disdain: “ambitious.”

Why do we judge these two student groups so differently?

If pressed, you would likely guess that impressiveness is a function of talent and hard work. The above examples, however, falsify this hypothesis. The activities of the second list require just as much hard work, and, in many cases, such as varsity tennis and regional orchestra, more natural talent than the activities of the first list. Yet, the first list strikes us as much, much more impressive.

Indeed, the real reason the first list is so much more impressive can be attributed to a little understood phenomenon…

The Failed Simulation Effect

When presented with a student biography we tend to oblige our instinct to mentally simulate the path that led to that student’s achievements. For example, when we hear about a student holding down two different club presidencies and a spot on the tennis team, we imagine the hectic, running from meeting to meeting lifestyle that supports that volume of tasks. We have no problem with this simulation. We know students like this. We feel that, with a high enough tolerance for pain, we too could be that busy. It’s hard work. But it’s not mysterious.

What happens, however, when presented with the story of a student who works with the U.N. and drafted a constitution for the Arab League? Our simulation apparatus fails. We don’t know how, exactly, one becomes a player in major international organizations.

The effect of this failed simulation: a sense of novelty and wonder.

And it is exactly this feeling that we end up interpreting as the sensation of being “really damn impressed.” In other words: The first three sample students elicit great admiration not because they are harder working or more talented than the second list, but because we cannot simulate the path they took to their achievements. This failure intrigues us. We don’t feel like we could have done the same. We don’t feel threatened. A sense of novelty and wonder sluices through our synapses.

Leveraging the Failed Simulation Effect

Understanding this subtle mental effect allows you to maximize the impressiveness you reap from the effort you expend in activities. The key, we now understand, is to push activities into a realm where most people cannot easily imagine the steps that got you to your destination. Here’s the good news: such pushes are a function more of planning and creativity than of hard work.

From my experience in deconstructing the paths taken by these types of students, I can identify three steps that will help you get to this impressiveness sweet spot:

1. Enter a Closed World and Exceed Expectations. The first step is to get involved as an insider in a world that interests you. This might mean landing an internship, or shadowing someone, or joining a relevant club. Once there — and this is key — tackle the opportunities given to you with vigor. Complete them fast. Go slightly above and beyond. In such entry-level, non-full time situations, the people above you will be pleasantly surprised that you are getting things done. You will soon be rewarded for this.
2. Package Insider Connections. After you’ve proved yourself in this world, you’ll begin to notice interesting opportunities that only an insider, like yourself, would know about. Look for an opportunity to lead a project that would be available only to someone on the inside. Leverage your insider knowledge to its fullest extent.
3. Escalate. The solo project from (2) will defeat most people’s simulation apparatus as it was built upon connections available only to insiders. In this final step, leverage this effect, and the good job you did your past project, to shake loose an even more un-simulatable project. Repeat this process a few times, with each iteration ramping up to an even more insider-supported, harder to simulate project.

Case Studies: How The Three Example Students Applied These Steps

Let’s examine how these three steps were applied by the sample impressive students at the beginning of the article.

Case Study #1: The high school student who wrote the curriculum.
She satisfied step (1) by taking a student internship at a well-known technology company. She then satisfied (2) by getting involved — and following through — on an internal project involving the application of the company’s technology to educational settings. Finally, (3) was satisfied when she volunteered, as her main intern project, to package up these findings into a full curriculum. By doing a good job and following through, she got the company to pitch the curriculum to their school partners; several picked it up.

None of this required any more effort than the standard high school summer job. But because it leveraged opportunities only available to someone working inside the education department of a technology company, it appears, to an outsider, to be un-simulatable — “how do you get states to adopt a curriculum you wrote!?” — and thus really damn impressive.

Case Study #2: The college student who worked with the U.N. and Arab League.
Attending school in the middle east, this student met up, by coincidence, with an old friend who had started an international youth activism network. To satisfy (1), he agreed to start a chapter of the organization in his own neck of the woods. He pushed the chapter to meet regularly and grow. By doing so, he met some important contacts and identified some important youth issues in the middle east. To satisfy (2), he made a lateral move to start his own organization focused solely on middle east youth issues. By attending conferences, and making phone calls, people got to know him. Finally, to get at (3), he leveraged this status and his connections to get invitations to help lead relevant initiatives at the U.N. and the Arab League. No mystery. He ran a youth organization in an under-represented region. These international bodies wanted to work on these issues. It was a natural fit.

This was hard work. But no more so than the running of any large club. Because, however, it dealt with an insider world — a vibrant sub-culture of international youth activism — it yielded rewards — involvement with the U.N. and Arab League — that, to an outsider, seem absolutely inexplicable.

Case Study #3: The high school CEO.
I’ll come clean: this story is based on the company I started in high school with my friend Michael Simmons. Mike and I knew how to design basic web sites because we were, well, nerds. Hoping to make some money, we stumbled across a local guy who ran a business directory web site for the Princeton area where we lived. To satisfy (1), we setup a little deal to help small business he listed build simple web sites. To satisfy (2), we leveraged the portfolio and experience this provided us to strike out on our own. One of our key insights working with the business directory was that it was easy to find sub-contractors that would, for a cut of the fee, tackle most of the time-consuming tasks of designing web sites. We landed a few clients and made some money. Finally, to satisfy (3), we leveraged the fact that our company looked like a big deal to hire a CEO, print some fancy marketing materials, buy suits, build up our team of sub-contractors, and, most importantly, raise our fees.

The company was fun. We never had more than one or two clients at a time. And our responsibility was mainly keeping them posted while our sub-contractors did the work. Looking back, Mike and I estimate the time we spent was roughly equivalent to being the president of a student club. The rewards, however, were so much higher. Because we leveraged the insider knowledge gained by working with a local web portal, we were quickly able to get to a point that foiled most people’s simulation apparatus.

In Conclusion

I apologize for the length of this article, but the subject of activity innovation is tricky. It is also, I must admit, one of my favorite issues to explore. If you’re looking to make an impact in this world — and you want to do so without suffering a steady stream of stress-induced panic attacks — you need to look beyond the standard exaltations to simply “get started!” and “work hard!” and “follow your passion and it will all work out!” Instead, think carefully about how impressive achievements really come about. When you know what you’re doing, you will be surprised by how soon you can get somewhere that earns serious admiration.

Last week, I introduced the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. This concept captures the general approach to student life that I’ve been promoting on this blog. The big idea is to find a way to become less overloaded and less stressed without becoming less impressive. I believe that a student should be able to have an engaging, fun college experience, and still get into a top graduate program or professional school, and have the ability to choose between outstanding job opportunities. I lived this dream. I’ve met dozens of other students who have as well. In this article, I explain how you can achieve it too.

The Framework

As with the Straight-A Method — which provides a structure for all of my study advice — here I will describe a general framework for the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. This framework can be realized with any number of specific strategies. Specifically, there are three main principles: underschedule, innovate, and focus. If you can satisfy all three — however you do it — you can achieve the Zen Valedictorian lifestyle.

PRINCIPLE #1: Underschedule

The Zen Valedictorian has more free time than he has activities or classes to fill it. He does not stuff his schedule to capacity. Instead, he purposefully underschedules. Rare are the days in which the Zen Valedictorian is working for most of his waking hours. More common are relaxing nights and last-minute adventures.

The goal of this principle is to leave room in student life for relaxation and participation in activities that generate happiness. It rejects the degenerate belief that if you’re not working every free minute than you’re somehow failing as a student. It also provides the flexibility needed to pursue the random interesting opportunities that often lead to big positive results.

To satisfy this principle requires two strategies:

1. Simplification: Have one major. Balance easy courses with hard courses during a given semester. Slash and burn your extracurricular commitments to the bare minimum.
2. Efficiency: Improve your study and productivity skills. Live the pillars of the Straight-A Method. The better these skills, the easier it will be to underschedule.

Previous posts that will help you understand and satisfy Principle #1:

• The Radical Simplicity Manifesto
• The Laundry-List Fallacy
• The Straight-A Method
• The Danger of Pseudo-Work
• The Auto-Pilot Schedule
• Fixed-Schedule Productivity

PRINCIPLE #2: Innovate

The Zen Valedictorian strives to be interesting not widely accomplished. The psychology of impressiveness reveals that people are more impressed by someone who makes them ask “how did he do that?” than someone who has a sizable laundry list of standard activities. Achieving the former, fortunately, requires less time — and significantly less stress — than achieving the latter. The Zen Valedictorian takes advantage of this reality by constantly looking to push his involvements into the rarefied territory of interestingness.

The goal of this principle is to stand out from the crowd by means other than simply outworking your peers.

To satisfy this principle keep looking for low-hanging fruit. That is, identify interesting, unexpected directions toward which you can push your involvements. Take the normal course of action for someone in your situation then pump up its ambition by 50%. Next ask: if I had to make this happen, what would it really require? More often than not, you’ll realize that what once seemed hopelessly ambitious is, in reality, possible if you’re somewhat clever and, more importantly, actually follow-through. Keep completing. Keep pumping up your ambition and finding ways to get somewhere more lofty. The interestingness will rise sharply with each new push.

Previous posts that will help you understand and satisfy Principle #2:

• Action is Overrated
• The Law of Complementary Attraction
  
• The Steve Martin Method
• The Grand Project
• The Information Theory of Success

PRINCIPLE #3: Focus

The Zen Valedictorian is a specialist. He focuses on a small number of areas and works consistently over time to become outstanding in them. He realizes that the relationship between reward and skill level is not linear, but, instead, exponential. A corollary of this truth: being excellent at one thing can yield significantly more rewards than being good at many. Even though the former requires much less time than the latter.

The goal of this principle is to maximize the rewards and interesting opportunities afforded while minimizing both the time investment and the schedule footprint; i.e., total number of unique activities: a metric that strongly predicts stress. The world rewards experts. It is indifferent to generalists. And it could care less how hard you worked.

To satisfy this principle the Zen Valedictorian will, by default, make his academic major an area of focus. He chooses a subject that intensely interests him (not the subject that seems most practical). Because he believes in underscheduling, he has the time need to put serious thought into his class assignments. He soon becomes a department star, which opens up a wealth of exclusive opportunities and rewards hidden from most students.

He will also typically chooses a single extracurricular activity in which to become excellent. By the time he graduates, a Zen Valedictorian should be well-known on campus for his focus-area skill.

Previous posts that will help you understand and satisfy principle #3:

• The Einstein Principle
• A Rap Star and a Rhodes Scholar Walk into a Bar
• Productivity is Overrated
• Would Lincoln Have Become President if he had E-mail?
• The Project Purge

Pulling It All Together

The Zen Valedictorian Framework derives from a careful understanding of two important questions:

1. What generates stress?
2. What makes someone impressive?

It notes that the answers to the two questions are different. It takes advantage of these differences to make possible the dream of a low-stress impressive student lifestyle.

Specifically, it notes that stress comes from having too many obligations pulling at your time. The principle of underscheduling prevents this situation from occurring.

Impressiveness, on the other hand, comes from doing things very well in a way that defies expectation. The principles of innovation and focus generate these accomplishments. The principle of underscheduling indirectly helps the effort by keeping you low-stressed and providing the time needed to chase down relevant random opportunities as they arise.

Moving Forward

We have a lot more ground to cover. Each of the three principles provides a rich area of exploration. Over the coming months we will dive into these ideas and improve our understanding of how to satisfy them and the types of strategies that might work. Also expect more case studies of real students who are living the Zen Valedictorian lifestyle.

My goal here is nothing less than to dramatically remake your vision of a successful college career. This transformation is not trivial. But I assure you it will be worth it.

As always, I look forward to your feedback and interaction.